Woodworking blog entries tagged with 'tutorial'

WOODTURNING from the Wheelchair(just a copy and paste from www.jamiespeirs.com )
Woodturning is one of the crafts that lends itself towards most disabilities. It can be done in a fairly small area with relatively inexpensive equipment. It is not overly strenuous and can be quick to show results; hence it’s mass popularity. The object of this is not to go into any great detail about woodturing itself, rather on guidelines on what look for in a course or in a tutor.
Red Pine Three T...

After seeing Steve at Woodworking For Mere Mortals, throw together a Slit Drum I have decided to build one as a Christmas present. I have built a prototype / test drum and can now proceed with designing the final drum and building it. Since this is a learning process, I have decided to blog the building of the drum to document what I have learned about it.
I did a lot of research on the internet on how to build a slit drum and found that there are three preferred ratios for tongues 3...

I have ordered 3 planes, so far, that were used. Of those three, only one didn’t arrive with the iron almost fully extended. I don’t see planes at garage sales any more, but when I did, I noticed the same thing. While the blade extension might seem like the obvious problem, one of the real underlying issues here is that the cap iron is not set right. The cap iron is another item on the plane that I think is overlooked, yet is an essential piece to successful plane operation.
Of...

IntroductionI think most of us would agree that we would like to spend as little time as possible sharpening and honing our edge tools, but we do realize the need for really sharp edges to get nice clean cuts and also to maintain control of the cuts. An experienced woodworker is therefore almost always willing to do whatever it takes to get the edges he needs.
My philosophy on sharpening is focused on speed, convenience and frequent easy edge refreshment (not beer Larry). The best way I...

Version 1.2a
At this point I decided to get more “radical” in my design approach. I removed two of the cross rails (found out through experience that I didn’t need them anyway). Then I took the corner poles out of the flanges and put a “sleeve” on the side of my table for the corner poles to slide into (see photo below). Electrical conduit clamps work great for attaching the sleeves.
This design also allowed me to adjust the height of the router sled in...

Movin’ right along, here’s Version 1.2 of my router planer.
Because I’d made the router sled larger in order to accommodate larger pieces, I now needed to design something bigger for the sled to ride on. That’s when I came up with the idea of using longer piping for the end poles and cross rails (instead of the 12” pipes and the plywood cross rails shown in my first design). The photo below shows my first attempt (my “beta” version) at this new des...

The next design I came up with for my router planer was based loosely on some of the designs some fellow woodworkers had posted right here on Lumberjocks. The biggest design change was that I eliminated the sled pictured in the first photo in my last blog entry and used angle iron glides instead.
Now here was a design I really took a liking to right away. This one allowed me to plane much larger pieces without fear of slipping off the edges of the runners because the router moves withi...

One of the things I found out very early on in my type of woodworking is that the slabs I use in my projects are often in dire need of planing. The problem with this is the thickness planer I had was not large enough to accommodate the width of most of these slabs. So, I began reviewing my old book and magazine libraries and surfing the Net to try and find something else that might meet the need for the type of work I planned to do.
The results of my search were mixed. The very first opti...

Maybe there is something I don’t understand. I can’t figure out how setting blade height to barely clear the gullet of the blade above the piece of wood being cut is appropriate.
I can, however, figure out two good reasons not to set the blade anywhere below its maximum height: First, considering that heat dulls the carbide tips and that heats builds up with friction and friction is proportional to the lenght of travel of the teeth in the material being cut, setting your blade low, let’s s...